Nokia has reportedly cut up to 15 per cent off the price of its Lumia handsets in a bid to flog off Window Phone 7 kit before Windows 8 appears in its next-gen smartphones.
The Finnish phone giant hasn't confirmed the cut, which was highlighted today by UK-based market watcher CCS Insight and made public by Reuters.
The Lumia …

COMMENTS

CPW

CPW are doing a 12 month contract with the 800 for £10.50/month on Voda (free phone) so the price has been crashing for a while, CPW probably trying to get rid of it's excess stock - although Asda were doing Sim Free for around £180 on the 800.

Re: FRAGMENTATION!!!

Re: FRAGMENTATION!!!

I'm not sure if my sarcasm detection is off today but yes, yes they do. It's one of the reasons an awful lot of people I know don't consider Linux to be a viable desktop OS, fragmentation. What works on one may not work on another, OS upgrades break entire dependency chains leaving software broken if it doesn't get updated too far more frequently than on Windows where you can quite happily run many of your old 32-bit Win9x apps on a brand spanking new 64-bit Win 8 system.

Re: FRAGMENTATION!!!

Fragmentation may be true for Android and Linux and iOS as well as for a bunch of programming platforms, but its generally being overrated by people with axes to grind.

But with Windphone 7, calling it fragmentation is misleading. Abortion would be the correct word.

Sticking to phones, you CAN generally upgrade iOS or Android phones, even if manufacturer's quit supporting it, as long as you bought a popular phone with support from Cyanogen and similar custom roms.

And even if you're still on iPhone 3 or good old Gingerbread, over 90% of current apps run just fine.

But here, its different: M$ is throwing out everything, you won't be able to run Windphone 8 apps on these.

Windphone 7s are as dead as can be, don't buy those clunkers, just cause they lowered the price a little to avoid getting stuck with the inventory :P

If you really want a windphone and you can't wait the short time for Win8 phones, its a pointless premature ejaculation, cause the new ones will also be discounted in hopes to actually get some market share.

And to the guy who wanted to buy one for his wife: you think she'll never use an app anyway, but just you wait, she'll eventually figure out that you knowingly bought her a clunker.

Re: FRAGMENTATION!!!

Re: FRAGMENTATION!!!

It's not so much the OS releases people complain about. But when Ubuntu does an upgrade, the update manager offers to install it for you, free and automatically. The biggest complaint about Android has been that, given the arbitrary support from the various OEMs, there's no way to know when/if you're getting the new OS. But at least it's pretty easy to write apps that run under just about any version of the OS.. most Android apps work all the way back to Android 1.6.

Worse still is Microsoft's Windows Phone policies -- the apps for the new OS don't run, period, on the old OS. They cut off Windows Mobile when Window 7 Phone was released (no app compatibility). Now, while W7P apps run on Windows 8 Phones, if you're writing for Windows 8, nothing works on Windows 7 Phone. So people tapping this cost cut are going to have limited apps support going forward.

Not that W7P has done that well, anyway. Lots of the W7P applications were paid development by Microsoft, and they're not getting great upgrades. Won't be a problem for W8P buyers if W8P actually sells -- a better chance, anyway, now that OEMs are allowed to make competitive hardware.

Windows 8 uses a virtualised Android environment- not dissimilar to the bluestacks player for other Windows versions. I can use WINE on iOS or any number of other virtualised environments- some natively, so what?

Nokia Maps

"the fully functional and available offline Nokia Maps may well appeal to anyone after a decent phone-navigation combo."

Nokia Maps is excellent especially offline when travelling abroad and avoiding huge data charges. Does this comment mean that the new Win 8 phones don't have the offline capability, or what? Any clues welcome because I can't understand why this point was made.

I'm interested to see how WP8 goes. WP7 is flawed, but actually quite impressive in several ways, considering who made it. It's attractive IMO, easy to use, and Sonic-needing-a-piss fast. Technically, it's inferior to its contemporaries, but what it does, it does suprisingly well. If they can make up for some of the previous deficiences with 8, it could be interesting.

I was just about to say the same - this thread just shows the hilarious nature of Android fanbois. And much as they like to claim they're simply "the educated ones", downvoting every comment about someone owning a WP device just shows they really ARE fanbois with just as little rational argument as the iTards.

Re: JDX

Re: JDX

But maybe he hates the slimeys from Microsoft and what they did to Nokia and Megoo, who knows?

Maybe he doesn't care about Nokia and hates them for what they did to their DRM music customers or another one of Micro$oft's knifings.

Personally, I'd be all for Microsoft, if they weren't suddenly trying to be like Apple, copying the closed system, while aiming for Monopoly retention and their own corporate benefit before anything else.

Interesting

I'm not a devotee of any platform in particular- my last SIM free phones having been Symbian, WP6.5, iOS and finally ICS. I've still my first communicator in its box on a shelf at home- something to show the kids when they grow up.

As a student 15+ years ago- I really started getting into techie phones- the good old Nokia Game which I won some very nice prizes in, tweaked my interest, and was probably instrumental in decidedly pointing my future career in a different direction. Those little Nokia mobiles- they were innocent times!

Personally I couldn't make the jump from WP 6.5 to WP7- as the GUI just did my head in ( a bad experience with a Zune probably coloured my expectations). I nearly cried when I dropped my Ericsson P800 and had to choose a replacement as it wasn't manufactured any longer.

iOS- Lets put it this way- the phone didn't last a day without me jail breaking it- and after I discovered I'd have to buy an expensive array of adaptors to plug it into my PC and audio system, my first impressions of the iPhone soured. I was using a G4 Titanium at the time- and thought I was so suave having a matching phone. Luckily this was before I had to do any repairs on the G4- and had to send off for a special screw driver to open the damn thing.

ICS- as supplied on my htc One X- is also not without its failings. Why the hell is the default mode when you plug it into your computer 'Engineering Mode' so you can't just plug it in and drag and drop as a mass class storage device? Also- just what is the story with apps refusing to terminate when you close them- necessitating a reboot every day or two? Never had that with iOS. The big ray of light on the horizon- is of course alerts- even before Apple shot themselves in the foot with their crappy mapping software- the alerts in Android were just spectacular compared to their iOS comparisons. The ability to run my own apps, natively, and the abundance of free developer tools- well, its easier to sell it to me than it once was.......

Personally- I'd happily buy a Lumia (900 preferably) as a backup- purely on the basis of its camera and mapping utility. My Zune experience aside- I'm neither a devotee or a protagonist of any particular platform- I'm more interested in the hardware, and more pertinently the raw horsepower, than I am the OS it ships with- hence my HTC One X (I could have waited for the S3- but I actually preferred the specs of the One X).

Lets not be snobs about the operating system- and instead look at the hardware and how it compares to other hardware at a similar price point. I'm not going to pay a premium for a badge, I really don't give a crap, and I'm not going to pay a premium for a particular environment- though the idea of walled gardens, propreietory connections or weird configuration changes when making simple connections with other devices- doesn't bode well.

In the 800 and 900- we have first and foremost a phone, a remarkable camera, and a decent mapping system. The OS is the downside- but the hardware goodness more than makes up for that- and we're now at price points where they're pretty much giving the damn things away. As a backup phone- I can't see any good reason not to get one..........?